Notes

Scroll down to find all the staff notes and reader reactions to the controversies over race and free speech on college campuses. (A similar debate on campus PC and mental health is here, spurred by our Sept ‘15 cover story.) Join the discussion via email.

[Cobb] writes as if unaware that millions of Americans believe the defense of free speech and the fight against racism to be complementary causes, and not at odds with each other. The false premises underpinning his analysis exacerbate a persistent, counterproductive gulf between the majority of those struggling against racism in the United States, who believe that First Amendment protections, rigorous public discourse, and efforts to educate empowered, resilient young people are the surest ways to a more just future, and a much smaller group that subscribes to a strain of thought most popular on college campuses.

Conor concludes, “Defenders of the First Amendment aren’t distracting from attention from racism—they’re preserving the tools necessary to struggle against it.” Then Sally Kohn wrote a piece for us diametrically opposed to that view:

[W]hat students from Yale to the University of Missouri and beyond are protesting is a pervasively one-sided definition of offensive behavior that these colleges and society in general still propagate. To this point, as [Cobb noted], “the student’s reaction elicited consternation in certain quarters where the precipitating incident did not.”

Consider, for instance, those in the chattering class who have readily bought into the idea that police feel under attack (as the result of the Black Lives Movement) and at the same time express deep skepticism—if not outright mockery—of people of color who feel under attack by police and by society. This divergent tendency isn’t about evidentiary standards. It’s about race—and the inclination to believe in the righteousness and inherent goodness of white people while perpetually doubting and demeaning people of color. As Roxane Gay wrote for The New Republic:

We cannot ignore what is truly being said by both groups of protesters: That not all students experience Yale equally, and not all students experience Mizzou equally. These conversations were happening well before these protests, and they will continue to happen until students are guaranteed equality of experience. They are still being forced, however, to first prove that it is worth opening a conversation about either.

There’s been a lot of discussion about how the issues at Yale are much bigger than Erika and Nicholas Christakis, and that’s certainly the opinion of many students. Earlier this week, Yale students refocused the narrative and engaged in a thoughtful, powerful demonstration of student activism through a “March of Resilience” to express solidarity for students of color, and a forum to discuss race and diversity on campus. [...] On Tuesday, Yale’s president and the dean of Yale College issued a welcome reaffirmation of the necessity of freedom of expression at the institution. Now, the institution must make clear that Yale supports Erika and Nicholas Christakis and they will not face punishment or termination for their role in starting a national conversation about the importance of free speech on campus.

Absorbing the events at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere, Nicholas Kristof, the liberal New York Times columnist, worries about the state of the political left right now:

We’ve also seen Wesleyan students debate cutting funding for the student newspaper after it ran an op-ed criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. At Mount Holyoke, students canceled a production of “The Vagina Monologues” because they felt it excluded transgender women. Protests led to the withdrawal of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker at Rutgers and Christine Lagarde at Smith.

This is sensitivity but also intolerance, and it is disproportionately an instinct on the left.

I’m a pro-choice liberal who has been invited to infect evangelical Christian universities with progressive thoughts, and to address Catholic universities where I’ve praised condoms and birth control programs. I’m sure I discomfited many students on these conservative campuses, but it’s a tribute to them that they were willing to be challenged. In the same spirit, liberal universities should seek out pro-life social conservatives to speak.

More broadly, academia — especially the social sciences — undermines itself by a tilt to the left. We should cherish all kinds of diversity, including the presence of conservatives to infuriate us liberals and make us uncomfortable.

Mark Salter, the former chief of staff to John McCain, sides with Kristof:

Some conservatives select the kinds of news they wish to receive, preferring media outlets that echo their opinions. They mock and revile contrary opinions, but they don’t typically forbid their utterance in their presence, as was the case recently at Mizzou and Yale and other universities. The growing intolerance of the left deserves more media attention than it has received ...

Salter then illustrates the illiberal natural of safe spaces in public places by recalling the death of a close friend:

Reporters were waiting outside the church where his funeral was held. They tried to be tactful, but they were intruding in a space where a lot people were suffering a lot of pain. A few of the mourners resented it. But most, including his immediate family, accepted the intrusion graciously. They might have wished the reporters had covered other stories that day, but they didn’t argue they had no business being there. They understood the requirements of good journalism and good manners aren’t always compatible.

Baraka’s assertions of Israeli complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks, which he reiterated after reading the poem with vague citations to Arab newspapers, were met with applause and a standing ovation from the assembled Yale students. When he noticed my skeptical expression from the back of the room, he diagnosed me as suffering from “constipation of the face” and being in need of “a brain enema,” to the uproarious laughter of my classmates. [...]

I did not insist upon the establishment of a “safe space” to sulk in my humiliation. Instead, I retired to my dorm and wrote about the event, in my capacity as a budding columnist for the Yale Daily News. Baraka’s speech, and, more importantly, the rapturous response, I wrote, “was one of the most disturbing events in my entire life.” That this trial by fire was provoked not by the white skinheads or Muslim anti-Zionists I had naively assumed were the only purveyors of anti-Semitic hatred, but by blacks, who, because of our shared history of oppression, I had been brought up to believe, were supposed to be my allies, made it all the more distressing.

Today, I look back on the entire incident as a formative event in my evolution from teenager to adult. My experience at Yale of confronting painful ideas, emotionally vexing situations, and learning how to cope with them, informs my opinion about the events roiling the campus today.

Freddie deBoer, the socialist academic at Purdue, appeals to pragmatism as much as principle when addressing the activist left on campus:

[U]nfortunately, there is in fact a strain of the academic left that does see freedom of speech as an outdated artifact of white supremacy, which I have encountered in both my academic and political life. I recognize why student protesters might feel moved to adopt an anti-free speech stance. [ … But] in order to effectively fight racism, these passionate student protesters will have to win over converts to their cause. That’s not an invocation of an abstract political principle; it’s a simple statement of the practicality of power. Because the white majority controls most of this country’s institutions, anti-racist activists must rally masses to their cause, to utilize people power. They must gain the support of those who are not already convinced of their message, whether or not that expectation is fair.

The final word in this round of commentary goes to college students themselves, namely an editorial from the Claremont Independent, a campus newspaper at Claremont McKenna led by editor-in-chief Hannah Oh:

We are ashamed of you [the student activists at this rally] for trying to end someone’s career over a poorly worded email. This is not a political statement––this is a person’s livelihood that you so carelessly sought to destroy. We are disappointed that you chose to scream and swear at your administrators. That is not how adults solve problems, and your behavior reflects poorly on all of us here in Claremont. This is not who we are and this is not how we conduct ourselves, but this is the image of us that has now reached the national stage.

We are disappointed in your demands. If you want to take a class in “ethnic, racial, and sexuality theory,” feel free to take one, but don’t force such an ideologically driven course on all CMC students. If the dearth of such courses at CMC bothers you, maybe you should have chosen a different school. If students chose to attend Caltech and then complained about the lack of literature classes, that’s on them. [...]

We are disappointed that you’ve used phrases like “silence is violence” to not only demonize those who oppose you, but all who are not actively supporting you. We are most disappointed, however, in the rhetoric surrounding “safe spaces.” College is the last place that should be a safe space. We come here to learn about views that differ from our own, and if we aren’t made to feel uncomfortable by these ideas, then perhaps we aren’t venturing far enough outside of our comfort zone. We would be doing ourselves a disservice to ignore viewpoints solely on the grounds that they may make us uncomfortable, and we would not be preparing ourselves to cope well with adversity in the future. [...] The hypocrisy of advocating for “safe spaces” while creating an incredibly unsafe space for President Chodosh, former Dean Spellman, the student who was “derailing,” and the news media representatives who were verbally abused unfortunately seemed to soar over many of your heads.

Lastly, we are disappointed in students like ourselves, who were scared into silence. We are not racist for having different opinions. We are not immoral because we don’t buy the flawed rhetoric of a spiteful movement. We are not evil because we don’t want this movement to tear across our campuses completely unchecked. We are no longer afraid to be voices of dissent.

As always, if you have any dissenting views of your own, email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll post the strongest, most persuasive ones.

Rob had a really great post this morning asking why American college students don’t strike the way students at universities around the world sometimes do. There are a variety of theories—you should read the piece—but I was struck by this quote from Angus Johnston, a professor at the City University of New York who researches student activism:

“Students in the United States today are living in conditions of economic precarity that didn’t exist in the 1960s,” he said. “As students have gotten poorer on average, tuition has gone up. And so they’re getting squeezed on both sides. They have a lot less ability to withstand the effects of … losing a semester, because if that happens, they’re gonna be screwed.”

That rings true, but I think it undersells the effects of rising tuition on campus, and what that might do to student activism. It’s not just that students have to pay more, which makes them more nervous about losing money. As tuition rates have risen—and particularly as state governments have drawn down funding for public universities—public and private universities have both increasingly come to look at students as sources of revenue. (For-profit universities just take this idea to its logical conclusion.)

That means that students come to be seen as “customers” by college administrators, and in turn they start to see themselves that way too. That has radical effects for how they interact with the university. Instead of being part of a bigger community, composed of scholars, teachers, learners, and others—a sort of “academical village,” to borrow Thomas Jefferson’s phrase—students show up, get the service for which they’ve paid, and leave with a diploma. Doing that leads to inevitable economic decisions: prioritizing fancy dorms, high-quality facilities, and popular eating options over faculty hiring, for example. Professors complain that students feel entitled and comfortable asking for better grades.

But it also makes it harder to see why you’d go on strike. Striking only makes sense if you see yourself as part of the integrated community, where the university’s direction is determined by a negotiation between adminstrators, faculty, students, and staff. If you’re a customer, though? Even leaving aside what you can afford, paying tuition, and then going on strike seems less sensible if you think classes are a product that you’ve purchased. It’s like going to Chipotle, paying for your burrito, then refusing to eat it.

A Honduran Garifuna who crossed the border illegally with her children gets help from a housing activist at the Bronx Spanish Evangelical Church. (Bebeto Matthews / AP)

A reader writes:

Enjoying the recent Notes. One thing your reader alludes to is that it’s much easier to study and argue about the “language surrounding poor health in an Indian slum” than the facts on the ground. I am not an academic, but in my own field, law, I am aware how much easier it is to work with words on the page and in law books than to get out and do the messy work with witnesses, etc.

Similarly, it seems to be easier to catch someone—e.g., using the word “thug” to refer to protesters in Ferguson—and get that person fired than to actually do anything about relations between police and the black community or the long exclusion of many African Americans from the the fruits of American prosperity. I wonder if this easiness factor might play a bigger part than we imagine.

A reader who would probably agree with that sentiment is Andrew Chen:

First of all, thanks for keeping so much Dish-ness alive at The Atlantic, and for providing a forum for robust, intelligent debate. I’m a public interest lawyer currently under a two-year-fellowship to run a clinic for homeless youth in Los Angeles. Public interest lawyers tend to be a pretty liberal bunch; I voted for Barack Obama twice and am likely to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary.

And yet I, too, have become increasingly frustrated and angry over time with the authoritarian tendencies of student activists on college campuses. For some reason, the Mizzou anti-journalist chants touched a nerve, and I put down my thoughts here.

TL;DR: The attitude evinced by these protestors shows that, philosophically, they seem to have abandoned any belief in the individual worth or dignity of those who disagree with them. This is not only morally repugnant, but is also probably going to doom the progressive movement in the long run (which to me, is terrifying).

From the reader’s long and excellent post:

Put simply, political capital is a thing. There is only so much time, media attention, and political will to get things done.

I am a public interest attorney* (waiting on bar exam results in ten days - yikes). My job is to listen to my clients, help them with what I can, and on a broader level work to create a society which corrects the injustices inflicted upon them. In particular, the vast majority of my clients are young people of color. Homeless, runaway, gay, lesbian, transgender, abused, neglected, drug-addicted, mentally ill young people who live day-to-day, meal-to-meal, with the constant threat of mortal violence at the hands of law enforcement or another person on the street hanging over them.

My fights are to dispute thousands of dollars in unjust ticket debt, to force a school district to give a teenager an education, to find a way to make sure someone with no safety net has a safe place to stay, something good to eat, a friendly face to talk to, and a hand to pull them up if they fall. A phone number to call if they feel unsafe. A job, a home, a future. I had a client yesterday with a black eye come in and ask us to help her figure out how to escape from a boyfriend who chokes and beats her, and then threatens suicide when she threatens to leave. I had another client last week who got arrested and thrown in jail after asserting his right to reasonable suspicion for stepping into the street to avoid a homeless person camping on the sidewalk.

I guess my point is that in the fight for racial justice, in the fight against poverty, we have limited time and resources to accomplish the things we want to accomplish. So when I hear activists talking about how one professor’s alleged insensitivity to Halloween cultural appropriation is causing their friends to have breakdowns; when I see so-called progressives threatening and shoving journalists for covering their story; when I hear friends describe “conservatives” and "Republicans" like Hutus would refer to Tutsis, I see a swiftly emptying hourglass of attention for progressive issues.

If you disagree with these views or others posted thus far, please email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll air the best counterpoints or differing viewpoints.

As an addendum to the Claremont McKenna note, check out this compelling scene. It centers on an Asian American immigrant student who brings some nuance to the discussion—but she’s physically interrupted and then accused of “derailing” the protest:

Over to Yale again, here’s a perspective from a reader with close ties to the school:

For context, I am a proud Yale and Silliman graduate and father of a current Yale student. The Christakises made two mistakes, one of substance and the other of timing and symbolism. Power is what threatens free speech. The Christakises recognized in the IAC’s email the power imbalance between the administration and the students; as professors and scholars, they related easily to students who might feel stifled by pressure from administrators.

What they didn’t think about was the power and privilege imbalances among the students themselves—something they have no personal experience of—and the fact that offensive speech can be an instrument of power rather than of resistance to power.

The ideal of the university is not to simply be a forum for free speech per se.

It is to create an environment where the free “marketplace of ideas” can flourish. Free speech is a critical part of that marketplace, but equally critical is that all participants feel secure and valued enough to listen without fear. Turning a blind eye to bigoted or similarly ignorant speech or symbolic conduct conveys a message of its own—that certain people’s fears and distress doesn’t matter. It conveys that Yale is not theirs, but belongs at its core to the same people who explicitly ran it for their own benefit for most of three centuries.

The Christakises are not racist, and neither are the vast majority of their supporters. They are simply people who lack the experience of being made to feel they don’t belong, or that they specifically don’t belong at Yale, because of their visible heritage. It simply never occurred to the pair how that kind of disempowerment skews the ability to participate in the marketplace of ideas: The powerless can’t hear, and the powerful have no incentive to listen.

The second mistake was context. The administration was originally trying, admirably in my view, to avoid outright punishment of offensive speech while still modeling good behavior and respect in a diverse community. While the Christakises email made some excellent points in a vacuum, styling it as a counterpoint to the IAC email changed the message completely. If you state, for example, that all of our lives are precious and worthy of protection from harm, that is totally uncontroversial. But if you answer “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” the exact same sentiment now denigrates and dismisses the struggles and concerns of people of color. The Christakises and their supporters failed to recognize that difference.

Unlike the “All Lives Matter” crowd, though, it is clear that the Christakises acted not out of bigotry but from a failure of experience and imagination. That is why the result of their email has indeed been a powerful teaching moment—just not the kind they thought, and not for whom they intended.

A very different view from this reader:

In this discussion, we are emphasizing the catastrophization of ethnic/sexual/gender slights. My understanding of catastrophization is this: a person treating a minor slight as an existential threat. In the Atlantic cover story, catastrophization is partly ascribed to a sense of entitlement or sensitivity on the part of a coddled generation. But I am not sure that this is totally correct.

I think catastrophization is two things: (1) a tactic for building a movement’s strength, and (2) a chance for young people to “practice” civil protest. Unfortunately, if this is correct, the movement builds strength at the expense of sincerity.

Take the Yale Halloween incident as an example. A professor makes a reasonable attempt to engage with angry students, and is met with demands for resignation. A student, apparently representing the feelings of the crowd, confronts the professor's husband, spews buzzwords until the man responds, and then she explodes into a profanity-laced tirade. The tirade seems almost unrelated to the man's response, except that she began it immediately after his calm words.

How can young men and women, apparently the best and brightest of America, be so absurd? What explains their lack of insight? Are they truly over-sensitive? They had to overcome some tough hurdles just to have made it to Yale. They can’t be this sensitive.

My understanding of catastrophization provides an alternative explanation. I think it is a tactic, one the European “professional revolutionaries” of 1848 would have admired. You provoke your opponent into attack, and then use that attack to solidify your moral high ground. Gain the sympathy of the public. You win a small battle, and you build up your power to intimidate.

In the Yale situation, the man’s response was not malicious enough to the young protester’s outrage. By his calm, he won the round. You can tell by the public’s mostly anti-protester reaction to the incident. But had Yale sent security, even to try and “ease” the situation, the protester would have won, and sympathy would be on her side.

Regardless of the Yale battle’s success, the movement can utilize incidents like it to prepare for future confrontations, which will be of greater significance than Halloween costumes. There is not going to be a Ferguson or Baltimore on every campus all the time—catastrophization is necessary to allow people to practice for the real thing.

Thus catastrophization serves both to solidify the movement’s prestige through small victories and to allow members of the movement to practice tactics in a relatively safe environment. It is not a random manifestation of entitlement or over-sensitivity. However, this tactic risks undermining the perceived sincerity of the movement and numbing the public to the public to expressions of outrage.

The college’s Dean of Students just resigned amid pressure from student activists:

Mary Spellman announced her decision in an email to the student body. She wrote, in part: “To all who have been so supportive, please know how sorry I am if my decision disappoints you. I believe it is the best way to gain closure of a controversy that has divided the student body and disrupted the mission of this fine institution.” The announcement came one day after student protests at the college, where many demanded more inclusive programs for what they call marginalized students, which include students of color, LGBT students, disabled students and low-income students.

At the 43:55 mark of the video seen above, Spellman responds to calls that she resign. At 49:35, two students announce a hunger strike until she does. Here’s the crux of the controversy:

In the past few days, an “offensive”email sent by Dean Spellman was widely circulated on Facebook and prompted calls for her resignation. In the email, Dean Spellman responded to an article that voiced concerns by a student of color, stating that she wants to better serve students “who don’t fit our CMC mold.” Her comment outraged several students of color, and the email was cited as another example of institutional racism at CMC.

The junior class president also just resigned, stemming from a Halloween photo she posed in that contained two blonde women in Sombreros and mustaches:

The photo started circulating early Sunday after CMC junior Casey Garcelon reposted the photo on her Facebook with the caption “Dear Claremont community, For anyone who ever tries to invalidate the experiences of POC at the Claremont Colleges, here is a reminder of why we feel the way we do. Don’t tell me I’m overreacting, don’t tell me I’m being too sensitive. My voice will not be silenced. I’m mentally drained from being a part of this community and I’ve had enough.

The class president, Erin Brackmann, apologized profusely to Garcelon and asked if she could please take down the photo:

In one of her messages, Brackmann wrote, “I fully understand your decision to keep the photo up, but could you please crop me out of it? It associates me with something I also think is offensive and a lot of comments have been targeted at me, by people who think that I was part of the group costume. I don’t want this to compromise my role and legitimacy as class president.”

Garcelon refused. She then publicly posted several Facebook messages and email from Brackmann and the other women in the photo. Apparently private correspondence isn’t considered a safe space at Claremont McKenna.

Howard University confirmed it was increasing security on its Washington, D.C., campus following an anonymous death threat posted online on Wednesday night. [...] The FBI confirmed the threat in a statement early Thursday afternoon. “We are aware of the online threat and have made appropriate notifications," the FBI said in a statement to the Washington City Paper. “We urge anyone who has information about the threat to contact the Metropolitan Police Department or the FBI.”

The threat was posted on a forum that appears to be a 4chan board, a photograph of the post has been shared widely on Twitter and Instagram.

Some words “by their very utterance” cause injury or incite an immediate breach of peace, and they do not receive constitutional protection.[2] Among the category of unprotected speech are “true threats,” statements in which a speaker expresses a “serious” intent “to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”[3] Even though statutes that punish unprotected speech have “never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem”[4] and Congress has made it a crime to use interstate communications facilities to make “threats,” the law governing this subject has been unclear.[5]

The federal circuit courts of appeals disagree over the correct mens rea requirement necessary to prove a violation of the federal threat statute. A majority of those courts require the government to prove only that the defendant knowingly made a statement that “was not the result of mistake, duress, or coercion” and that a “reasonable person” would regard as threatening.[6] Other courts have required a different, stricter standard—one that requires the government to prove not only that the defendant knowingly made a statement reasonably perceived as threatening, but also that he subjectively intended for his communication to be threatening.[7]

Update: A letter sent by the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Greg Lukianoff’s group, to Mizzou officials today contains a passage especially relevant to this history:

[T]he University of Missouri itself is at the center of one of the [U.S. Supreme] Court’s most famous decisions applying this principle [that merely offensive or hurtful speech is protected] specifically to the public university campus. In Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri, 410 U.S. 667, 670 (1973), the Court held that “the mere dissemination of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’” That case memorably upheld the rights of journalism student Barbara Papish to distribute a newspaper featuring a cartoon depicting police officers raping the Statue of Liberty and the Goddess of Justice, as well as an article titled “Motherfucker Acquitted.”

Flag desecration, funeral protests, and cartoons of the kind distributed by Papish are without question considered “hateful” or “hurtful” by some, even by many. With passions running high at Mizzou in the midst of important discussions and debates on the topics of race, equality, and justice, it is quite likely, if not inevitable, that some exchanges were and will be considered hateful or hurtful. It is crucial that students be able to carry out such debates without fear that giving offense will result in being reported to the police and referred for discipline by the university. Indeed, the expectation that the right of students to fully express themselves on the Mizzou campus will be respected is part of what has made the demonstrations of the last few weeks possible.

My fiancee is a Mizzou alumna, and we got into a brief squabble about this the other night. It’s frustrating because she kept insisting that I wasn’t there and couldn’t know what the protesters had endured during their time on campus. She wouldn’t hear my argument that preserving free speech is important no matter what the situation, even though I agree with the cause of the protesters just as much as she does. I couldn’t seem to make her understand that their situation doesn’t excuse their attempted suppression of the free speech of others.

Once that line has been crossed, all the opposition has to do is say “but they did the exact same thing.” And they can hit back with the same approach but with much more cultural and institutional power behind it.

In other words, inroads to authoritarian behavior, even in the service of a noble cause, always lead to the use of authoritarian behavior against the people who first look to it as a line of defense. By preserving First Amendment rights, the protesters might make a slightly longer road for themselves in the short term, but they will also ensure that road doesn’t lead them into a box canyon of their own making.

Here’s a more historical view from a “graduate student in the humanities at a major Midwestern research university”:

There’s an aspect of the recent campus “political correctness” debates that seems to be missing in all of the discussions of millennial fragility, standards of civility, and so on. There is, after all, a reason that the college campus has been the epicenter of this current wave of “P.C.,” and it isn’t simply attributable to youthful demographics or politically liberal professors. It’s the product of a larger trend in academic scholarship within the social sciences and humanities over the last three decades or so, usually called the “cultural turn.”

Many fields have moved away from a materialist view of the world and toward a seemingly obsessive focus on discourse as the most important explanation for social problems like income inequality, racism, sexism, etc. The idea, to put it simply, is that the way we represent people, places, and things is as important—if not more important—than reality itself.

In fact, reality is actually itself shaped by the way it is represented. Thus, making use of clichés and stereotypes, using a word that contains certain connotations, or even simply speaking at all without the proper qualifications (primarily based on gender/race/class identity) may not just be questions of taste but, instead, potentially grave acts of violence.

Some may remember that in the 1990s, this formed the basis for a broad debate in academia over the merits of what was generally referred to as “postmodernism.” This debate is pretty much over, partially due to the turnover of older professors trained in materialist methodologies retiring and being replaced by younger scholars who enthusiastically embrace the priorities of the “cultural turn.”

Also, I suspect, the debate is over because of the frustrating inefficacy of a conversation in which disagreement is construed as oppression or violence. It’s simply easier for the many professors who do not share the research priorities of the cultural turn—for example, a sociologist studying the reasons for poor health conditions in Indian slums instead of the language surrounding poor health in an Indian slum—to simply defer to their discourse-focused colleagues on most issues rather than risk career-damaging accusations of “silencing” or “marginalizing” or “epistemological violence.”

Perfectly apt and inoffensive words like “native” are considered too retrograde for public use owing to their perceived, oppressive connotations. That word is replaced by longer, Latinate synonyms like “indigenous,” which are in turn rotated out for even longer, clumsier alternatives (“autochthonous”). It is in this triviality-addicted academic environment that intellectually-engaged students begin to discover the world around them and to grapple with its many injustices.

A student concerned about the plight of Central American immigrants living illegally in the U.S., for example, learns that the first and most important steps to alleviating this problem are to change the language he or she uses to talk about the issue. They are not “illegal immigrants”; they are “undocumented,” or preferably just “immigrants.” One should be wary about referring to them as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” as this may reify harmful, generalized stereotypes. Referring to them as “refugees” rather than “immigrants” may call much-needed attention to the role of the U.S.’s drug policies in fomenting societal unrest in their countries of origin, but on the other hand it may reinforce negative perceptions of Central American nations as violent, backwards “banana republics.”

Perhaps the student should avoid using any labels at all and allow individuals from the marginalized community identify themselves? The stakes here are very high. While none of this, of course, has any effect on the living conditions of undocumented immigrants, change must begin somewhere.

Is it any wonder then, that within this academic zeitgeist, where terminology is considered the foundation of social change and language itself contains the capacity to inflict violence and heap misery upon millions of people, that politically-active students have begun to demand administrative action to control speech and other forms of expression on campus? A blonde-haired, Anglo-American student dressed in a Villa-esque costume with bandoliers and a large sombrero is not just having fun with a pop-culture archetype on Halloween. She is mocking and degrading Mexican-American students on campus by appealing to clichés of Mexican lawlessness, and in so doing she makes campus an oppressive, potentially violent and unsafe space for other students of Mexican ancestry.

We know this because scholarship has been telling us this for decades. Decades of research on the role of language and representation in processes of oppression and marginalization has led to an academia where the free expression of ideas is tightly-controlled and the proponents of language-policing believe, with the kind of certainty that comes only from religion or theory, that they are engaged in a war against the forces of injustice.

In order to move beyond the kind of campus environment where students feel threatened by their peers’ poor taste in costumes—or by an email written by a professor suggesting that their fellow students may be entitled to their poor taste—there must also be a change in the priorities and attitudes of professors themselves. It is up to the next generation of scholars entering the academy to find a way forward, out of this unpleasant and deeply trivial intellectual quagmire. Based on the worldviews expressed by the current generation of students leading the “P.C.” charge, I am not optimistic.

Disagree with that assessment or simply have a different view to share? Email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll air the strongest dissenting views. Update from a reader:

I am a graduate student in the humanities at UC Berkeley, and though my name/position are clear from my signature and email address, I would ask that I remain anonymous if my words should ever see the light of day. The second email you posted, from the graduate student at the midwestern research university, is illuminating in its anonymity. The position that the student takes, which I believe to be well-founded and fair, cannot really be taken with one’s name attached to it, especially if the speaker is a graduate student.

The reader’s fear is that the next generation of faculty—that is, the current graduate students—are training and learning in an intellectual environment detached from reality, all gripped by the fear that reckless talk about “reality” will make it real. Further, we are to fear that, if we describe reality as it is, we will be complicit in its ills. And thus we add successive layers of insulating language until we are engaging in nothing but semantics, a realm that people of our skill set can comfortably dominate.

As your first reader suggested, the tendency is inherently authoritarian, and like any authoritarian system, it is prone to internecine conflict. Sealed from the outside world behind this growing intellectual barrier, the near enemy is the only one near enough to throttle—thus the reason for the reader’s anonymity, and mine. The whole worldview leads inexorably to purges, and graduate students (and, increasingly, non-tenured faculty) are the most vulnerable targets.

In a roundabout way, though, I think the graduate student’s email is reason for hope, if indeed we hope for a revival of free speech and room for dissenting views. A fractious ideology like this one makes more enemies than friends, and although its proponents are quite loud, they are not necessarily preponderant in numbers. Those who are skeptical of the entire edifice, and wise enough to keep their mouths shut, might very well comprise a silent majority—the term’s historical and cultural connotations be damned.

The protest was organized by the group People of Color at Ithaca College to express their concerns about racism on campus. They called for a vote of no confidence against Ithaca President Tom Rochon, as well as for Rochon to step down. During the protests [Wednesday], The Ithaca Journal reports, one student asked, “How can a campus dedicated to preparing us for the real world not actively foster growth to our consciousness of oppression and privilege?”

In March, the student government at Ithaca College, in upstate New York, went so far as to propose the creation of an anonymous microaggression-reporting system. Student sponsors envisioned some form of disciplinary action against “oppressors” engaged in belittling speech. One of the sponsors of the program said that while “not … every instance will require trial or some kind of harsh punishment,” she wanted the program to be “record-keeping but with impact.”

Full details on that dystopian idea here. For the protests Wednesday, Melissa Quinn chronicles the recent microaggressions that student leaders are using to pressure the president out of a job:

The first involved public safety officers who, during training sessions with Ithaca College resident assistants, allegedly made “racially insensitive” and “aggressive” statements, according to The Ithacan, Ithaca College’s student newspaper.

The second, [said Kyle Stewart, a spokesperson for the Student Government Association], centered on an off-campus party hosted by an unaffiliated fraternity last month. The party was themed “Preps and Crooks,” and students and alumni viewed the theme, described in a Facebook post, as “racially charged” and a “microaggression,” according to The Ithacan.

The last incident occurred during a university-sponsored event called “Blue Sky Reimagining” last month, where an African-American alumna of Ithaca College said she had a “savage hunger” to succeed in her professional career. A Caucasian Ithaca College alumnus speaking alongside the woman repeated her description, calling the alumna a “savage” multiple times, Stewart said. [...]

People of Color at Ithaca College called on Rochon to respond to the incidents and became frustrated when the responses from Ithaca College’s administration were inconsistent, Stewart said. In the case of the fraternity event, the response from college leadership was swift, and Ithaca distanced itself from both the fraternity and the event, calling the language in a post describing the party “reprehensible for its racial and class stereotyping,” the Ithacan reported.

Ithaca’s response to the comments at Blue Sky Reimagining, however, came days later—and after a video was taken offline.

[Students] walked out of class en masse Wednesday at noon in support of the injustices students of color face on college campuses nationwide. Raven Fowlkes-Witten, a Smith student who organized the movement, said she was inspired by a similar walk-out planned for Ithaca College Wednesday to protest their president’s handling of race issues on campus. [...]

About 200 people, including students, professors and the dean of the college, gathered in the middle of campus. Someone started chanting “who’s not here” to call attention to white students who don’t carry the burden of racism, Fowlkes-Witten said. The chant was also meant for students of color who can’t be at Smith because of institutional racism, she said.

Update from a “loyal tipster” reader who flags “some complaints about Ithaca College’s president that have been passed out recently”:

Earlier this week we heard briefly from a staff member of The Maneater, the student newspaper at the University of Missouri. Now a former staffer writes in:

I was a journalism undergrad at Mizzou 20 years ago (‘93) and immediately began working for The Maneater. I spent the next two years covering black student government (and white), as well as the black and white fraternity systems, all of which were 100 percent segregated—not by policy, but because people chose not to intermingle and sit amongst each other.

I tried endlessly to make black friends. I covered their communities for two years. I still had no friends. As an outsider—someone from Colorado on a campus that largely draws students from in-state—I couldn’t understand the anger and hostility I encountered, nor fathom why none of the black students would even give me a chance to talk to me, to find out who I am. I became frustrated and eventually gave up when so many black students couldn’t care to even recognize that I was their ally; I was someone eager and willing to help. But they were so standoffish and frankly “blind” to any difference between different white people.

This year, black students protested the annual Homecoming parade. They were doing that 20 years ago too; it was my first cover story I wrote for The Maneater.

For my news story, I couldn’t get any of the protestors to articulate what EXACTLY the changes they wanted. Apparently these protests have been going on every year since! The response of the white people I interviewed in the audience at the protest 20 years ago was bewilderment:

“Why are they shouting and making black power fists in the middle of warm, fall day? We’re just here to celebrate our community and bring out children, and then all these people show up screaming and angry. Why would they do that?”

Shouting things like “justice now” and waving black power fists and marching with angry scowled faces in the middle of a happy fall parade filled with small children—what can that do short of alienating and hardening the hearts of the people who are watching it? Hurling profanity at random groups of people—all it does is alienate the white people who actually believe in equality and want to partner with you.

If Mizzou black students want to make genuine systemic change, it will happen not through screaming, not using profanity and hysteria. It will happen by calmly and logically listing out concrete, specific changes they would like to see. And they need to measure “success” not by whether all 100 of their requests are met. Success is if SOME of the requests are met, and the ones that aren’t, it is calmly and respectfully debated what the reasons are.

My hunch is this whole issue is really about the larger broader social issues related to the arrests and shootings of black men around the country, and less about some sort of vile, threatening environment at Mizzou itself.

It’s worth noting the Concerned Students of 1950, the activist group that forced the resignations of Mizzou’s president and chancellor, did issue a list of fairly concrete, specific demands to the university last month:

I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten apology to the Concerned Student 1-­9-­5-0 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1-9-5-­0 demands. We want Tim Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators, consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.

II. We demand the immediate removal of Tim Wolfe as UM system president. After his removal a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.

III. We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community.

IV. We demand that the University of Missouri creates and enforces comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff, and administration. This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.

V. We demand that by the academic year 2017-2018, the University of Missouri increases the percentage of black faculty and staff campus-wide to 10%.

VI. We demand that the University of Missouri composes a strategic 10 year plan by May 1, 2016 that will increase retention rates for marginalized students, sustain diversity curriculum and training, and promote a more safe and inclusive campus.

VII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding and resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals -- particularly those of color, boosting mental health outreach and programming across campus, increasing campus-­wide awareness and visibility of the counseling center, and reducing lengthy wait times for prospective clients.

VIII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding, resources, and personnel for the social justices centers on campus for the purpose of hiring additional professionals, particularly those of color, boosting outreach and programming across campus, and increasing campus-­wide awareness and visibility.

After the president and chancellor lost their jobs on Monday, the group issued new demands:

“Moving forward, Concerned Student 1950 demands an immediate meeting with the UM System Faculty Council, Board of Curators and the governor of the state of Missouri to discuss shared governance and create a system of holistic inclusion for all constituents,” said Marshall Allen, an original member of Concerned Student 1950, announced at the conference. Allen added that the group’s demands must be met “in totality.”

I think there’s a lot going on in the muddle on campus. Some of the (lack of) discussion resembles an internet argument, for example. I’ve recently had quite a few online encounters where I think I was mostly agreeing with the other person, but because we weren’t using 100 percent identical premises and language, we wound up arguing anyway. And “Walk away, he doesn’t deserved to be listened to” from the Yale student sounds awfully like “Don’t feed the trolls” to me. Christakis is not a troll, of course, but the internet is where most people of my generation got their debating skills, such as they are.

Another reader is more pointed in his criticism of the discourse:

Perhaps this new methodology of social justice has its roots in a religious-like zeal in which all disagreement and dissent must be stamped out. Has anyone else noticed how “privilege” is like the fundamentalist version of “original sin”? Then if you challenge them, they can say the worst possible things about you with no recourse or shame—provided they are less “privileged” then you.

A law professor makes a couple of key distinctions in the Yale saga:

Ms. Christakis’ e-mail seems to conflate the wishes of a white preschooler to dress mimicking a fictitious, animated, individual, and named Asian character with the desire of college-age, mostly white, often male students to costume themselves as nameless, de-individualized black, Asian, or other persons of color. Small children of any background need neither excuse, justification, nor explanation for wanting to costume themselves as fictional characters. Children who do so typically mean no harm and cause no harm. Little kids just want to have fun.

However, in the vast majority of cases, college “kids” are legally adults.

Yes, these big “kids” also want to have fun. They want to be irreverent and silly and, as Ms. Christakis writes in her e-mail, “a little bit obnoxious” or “a little bit inappropriate.” Here I agree with Christakis; maybe these college students should be allowed a lot of leeway to behave in these ways. Colleges are places where the young go not just for education but for respite from the world. We should condone and even encourage a certain amount of mildly raucous carnival fun like Halloween where, as Christakis writes, students may engage in “a certain regressive, or even transgressive” behavior. Just as in other parts of the grown-up world, students should not be required to respect others.

But there are times when students should be asked to respect others. Tolerating ersatz carnival is condoning insult, wherein people in power mock the relatively powerless. And citing freedom of expression norms to protect it is especially pernicious. Colleges have a unique responsibility to educate students well beyond the classroom. In loco parentis [as Robby Soave discussed] may not be as robust a doctrine as in past decades, but neither is it dead letter. Inculcating values of respect, thoughtfulness and decency remain important parts of the mission of modern colleges.

This reader turns to the lack of decency among other students:

Perhaps I’m being overly simplistic, but when did it become okay to spit on those with whom you disagree? Students at Yale did, and in doing so violated basic tenets of civic discourse, as well as potential criminal and constitutional laws. The shame of it is that these groups seem to have legitimate claims of racism against their schools. These acts by individuals most certainly (hopefully) do not reflect the general feelings of each student group, but if there was a way to find sympathy for the “establishment,” these students provided it.

I suspect the students may say in response to my problems with spitting that their adversaries do much worse. Which is probably true (especially with respect to the truly racist acts that have occurred there). But that logic is similar to saying it’s okay to torture captives of war because we know our enemies are doing it to us.

A final reader, N.P. Adams, thinks through the various realms of free speech:

Too many of the people opining on these issues are using the idea of freedom of speech in very vague, unspecified ways. At least some of this controversy would be clarified, if not resolved, just by getting clear on what we mean by freedom of speech. Only when we are clear on what we mean can we productively debate its grounds, its value, and its limits.

In the first instance, freedom of speech is about the relation of citizen to state. When the Constitution protects freedom of speech, it protects citizens from infringements on their expressions by the state. Suppression of speech by the state is a distinct, and distinctly more important, problem from most of the issues that have been called freedom of speech in these recent controversies. The state has immense coercive power that it can bring to bear on speech, and when it does so it has a profound and direct impact on the quality of our political culture and on the ability of individuals to live their lives freely.

Freedom of speech in other contexts—for example, between members of a university community, between family members, between neighbors, between church members, and so on—is a very different issue. First, the problem of coerciveness is, if not absent, at least not the same. Your church might expel you if you violate its norms, but it won’t lock you in a small room. Second, the purpose and nature of these contexts is very different. We think that there is often positive value in restricting speech in these spaces. Something would be lost if we did not.

These contexts are not the same as the political sphere, and different ways of interacting with people are appropriate in different contexts. This isn’t to say that suppressing speech in these contexts is necessarily good. We still need to interrogate the norms of those communities and ask whether they are apt. But they are not the same as political norms. When we enter these more local, more intimate communities, we subject ourselves to norms in different ways.

Of course, universities are a particular context where freedom of speech matters a very great deal. It matters for political reasons, as universities aim to train reflective citizens, and it matters for educational reasons, as universities strive to be a space where people can try out new ideas in a more open and less risky setting. (Of course it matters in a lot of other ways too, as with tenure and professors.) But universities often strive to be communities of a more robust sort as well, where certain norms of conduct matter for how members of the community can learn, and live, and flourish.

Sometimes those norms of flourishing community will come into conflict with norms of free speech. It’s not true that the norms of free speech should just automatically win when they conflict with other norms in this case. Because the university context is not the state-citizen context, the balance between free speech norms and other norms is going to be different. In all likelihood, the free speech norms are going to be more restricted than in the political sphere, as they are more restricted in religious and family and other community contexts as well.

This is not to say that the balance being called for in the particular Yale case or others is correct. But it’s important to realize that the context is different, so the appeal to freedom of speech that is often decisive in the political context should be different as well. The mere fact of speech restrictions is not a trump.

The events at Yale over the past weeks have provoked a great deal of conversation, but little effort to understand or acknowledge the cultural and institutional biases at play. In their responses, many have made the same mistake that my friend did [by dressing in blackface], assuming that individual actions can be divorced from their broader context, or from the larger and more troubling legacy of racial discrimination in America. But they can’t.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about these students’ censorious actions is how profoundly conservative they are. By communicating an expectation that their master or president protect them from unsightly Halloween costumes, or promise them no more hurtful words will be said at their expense, students are essentially calling for a return to campus life under in loco parentis. [...] Half a century ago, student activists liberated themselves—partly, at least—from in loco parentis: the paternalistic notion that college administrators should serve as watchful guardians, restricting students’ activities and rights in order to provide a safe environment for them, the way a mother or father would.

Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others. The phenomenon also exists in other nonacademic left-wing communities, many of them virtual ones centered on social media, and its defenders include professional left-wing intellectuals. [...]

That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

But Daniel Drezner at the Washington Postdownplays the situation at Yale—namely the viral video of the student screaming at the faculty member and an op-ed written by another student—as basically the behavior of college goofs:

One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are. Anyone who thinks that the current generation of college students is uniquely stupid is either an amnesiac or willfully ignorant. As a professor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you that college students have been saying stupid things since the invention of college students.

The difference today is that because of social media, it is easy for college students to have their opinions go viral when that was not the original intent. [...] If you are older than 22 and reading this, imagine for a second how you would feel if professional pundits pored over your undergraduate musings in real time.

One part of my life, the part that engages with the broader political conversation, is filled with well-meaning liberal and left people who say “oh, there’s no illiberal attitudes among college students — that’s all a conspiracy by the conservative media.” These people, generally, are not on campus. Meanwhile, my extensive connections in the academy, and my continuing friendships with many people who are involved in the world of campus organizing, report that this tendency is true — and often justify it, arguing that this illiberalism is in fact a necessary aspect of achieving social justice.

Shifting back to the Missouri campus, Balloon Juice’s Betty Cracker succinctly sums up the problem with how the protestors pushed back the media:

This isn’t a George W. Bush rally; there are no “free speech zones.” If you want to escape reporters, it’s pretty simple — leave the public space.

Media critic Erik Wemple chronicles the actions of the non-students at that standoff:

These three university employees had a chance to stick up for free expression on Monday. Instead, they stood up for coercion and darkness. They should lose their jobs as a result.

The most infamous of the three, communications professor Melissa Click, just resigned her courtesy post at the journalism department, but her job is still intact. Now there’s a report that the Missouri University Police Department is monitoring speech:

[T]he MUPD asked “individuals who witness incidents of hateful and/or hurtful speech or actions” to call the department’s general phone line “to continue to ensure that the University of Missouri campus remains safe.” [...] In the email, MUPD readily admits that hurtful or hateful speech is not against the law. But, they write, “if the individuals identified are students, MU’s Office of Student Conduct can take disciplinary action.”

[T]here’s not even any claim that they’re just trying to find evidence of crimes, or trying to answer speech with more speech. Here a university is urging students to call the police whenever they hear “hurtful speech,” precisely so the university “can take disciplinary action” against the speakers. This is the new face of the modern university.

[T]he Wesleyan Student Assembly affirmed a resolution to restructure how The Argus is funded. The resolution is complicated, but it would substantially decrease The Argus’s printing budget; money saved this way would be put toward stipends for writers at various campus publications that don’t publish as frequently as The Argus. The WSA claims the purpose of the resolution is to “reduce paper waste,” by printing The Argus less frequently. The exact details haven’t been hammered out yet, but Argus editors expect their funding to be cut by $15,000 [the total budget is about $30,000].

If you’d like to highlight other controversies over campus speech across the U.S., drop me an email. Update from a reader:

This reminds me of a related controversy at Brown University last month in which their school paper published a couple of controversial op-eds. The response wasn’t to argue against what was written, but to complain that they shouldn’t have been published in the first place because of how it made some people FEEL.

As one student said, “When an institution like The Herald, the university’s oldest newspaper, posts this type of article, our comfort in this space is taken away.” I found this quote particularly shocking; she actually believes she should be made to feel comfortable when reading a newspaper! The exact opposite is true, especially of op-eds. You should be agitated and challenged and made to think, not reflexively look to stop the conversation because of your discomfort.

I was a student at Northwestern University from 2009 to 2013. During that time, a small number of students on campus did some pretty racist stuff. In 2009, two graduate students wore blackface to a Halloween party; a few years later, more than a dozen kids dressed up in varying types of redface and blackface for an outdoor “Beer Olympics” party. Both incidents produced student anger and campus discussions.

Incidents like these exist on two levels simultaneously. On the one hand, they are offensive to many students, a betrayal of the idea of college as a respectful and enlightened place. On the other, they are very bad PR. So to head off both negatives, university administration began emailing students a week before Halloween, reminding kids not to dress in blackface or do something to mock other people’s race or religion. It included this set of questions:

• Wearing a funny costume? Is the humor based on “making fun” of real people, human traits or cultures?

• Wearing a historical costume? If this costume is meant to be historical, does it further misinformation or historical and cultural inaccuracies?

• Wearing a ‘cultural' costume? Does this costume reduce cultural differences to jokes or sterotypes?

• Could someone take offense with your costume and why?

These emails felt unfortunate but necessary. Gawkerwrote them up, but even the feeling among students was something like: Better an ounce of prevention-related headlines than, you know, a pound of the other type.

The emails became a part of the campus calendar. A week before Halloween? The please-don’t-be-racist email was going to go out. And usually they were signed by our old dean of students, Burgwell Howard.

Howard moved to Yale this fall. Students there received a similar email this October—and the email looked much the same to the one we got in 2010.

But I do feel like that past plays into the current discussion of what’s happening at Yale. Administrators are proliferating at nearly every campus in the country. Many professors and graduate students resent their reach; they feel that the various vice associate provosts are doing little more than shuffling papers and making busy work for themselves. This is part of the subtext when critics sneer that 13 different administrators signed Yale’s Halloween email.

But the Yale Halloween email emerged from professional experience as much as anything else. I’m no defender of administrators everywhere, but in light of what happened at Northwestern (and countless other schools where blackface has been a problem), the Yale email looks less like administrative overreach and more like historically informed prudence.

Maybe that will let us move on a bit from one particular he-said-she-said incident—as one Yale student, Aaron Z. Lewis, has already asked us to do.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

The senator from Massachusetts announced she was running for president on New Year’s Eve—and then had the field largely to herself.

CLAREMONT, N.H.—Elizabeth Warren wants the look on her face to be funny. It’s somewhere between stern and confused and disappointed, complete with fists briefly on her hips, like she’s playing a mom in a commercial who just found an adorable kid making a mess on the floor.

That’s how the senator from Massachusetts responds late Friday when I ask her what she thinks will happen if the rest of the Democratic primary field doesn’t follow her lead and put talking about the economy at the center of their campaigns.

“I don’t know how anyone could not talk about the economy—and corruption!—and diagnose what’s wrong in America today. I just don’t know how they could do it,” she said, then added with a little snark creeping in to her voice, “Good luck …”

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

Like many people who spend too much time on Twitter, I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.

“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me: His smugness, radiating from under that red MAGA hat, was everything I wanted my teenagers not to be.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

During those three weeks, Felix had talked. He was a clinical psychologist who had also spent a lifetime writing poetry, and though his end-of-life speech often didn’t make sense, it seemed to draw from his attention to language. “There’s so much so in sorrow,” he said at one point. “Let me down from here,” he said at another. “I’ve lost my modality.” To the surprise of his family members, the lifelong atheist also began hallucinating angels and complaining about the crowded room—even though no one was there.

The death of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t a galvanizing event, but the premature end of a movement that had only just begun.

“Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

As sure as Jesus’s words proved prescient about the adoption of Christianity in the empire that killed him, so too the modern-day legend of King writes itself in real time. In the official story told to children, King’s assassination is the transformational tragedy in a victorious struggle to overcome.

President Donald Trump is trapped. He shut the government to impose his will on the incoming Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. That plan has miserably failed. Instead, Trump has found himself caught in the trap he supposed he had set for his opponents.

Now he is desperately seeking an exit.

Trump attempted Exit One on January 8.He spoke that evening to the nation from the Oval Office, hoping to mobilize public opinion behind him, pressing the Democratic leadership of the House to yield to him. That hope was miserably disappointed. Surveys post-speech found that Trump had swayed only 2 percent of TV viewers. In the 10 days since the speech, Trump’s approval ratings have dipped to about the lowest point in his presidency. The supposedly solid Trump base has measurably softened.

Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs.

On January 20, 2017,Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

The civil-rights leader is now celebrated as a modern founding father, a celebration that gives those who oppose his policy agenda a claim to his legacy.

Every year, on the third Monday in January, people play their hand at the same game. “What would Martin Luther King Jr. think?” becomes an unwritten essay prompt for op-eds, a topic of speeches and sermons, a call to action, and a societal rebuke. In this annual pageant, there are few who would ever mark themselves as living in opposition to the legacy of King, even as they work to dismantle it.

It was only natural that Vice President Mike Pence would quote King in defense of President Donald Trump’s decision to continue the ongoing government shutdown until he receives full funding for a border wall. “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was: ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy’,” Pence said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, citing King’s famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. “You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process, to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on Congress to do: Come to the table in the spirit of good faith.”

She beat George W. Bush on Social Security privatization, and she’ll beat Trump on the wall.

Democrats sometimes portray themselves as high-minded and naive—unwilling to play as rough as the GOP. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is, once again, proving that self-image wrong. She’s not only refusing Donald Trump’s demand for a border wall. She’s trying to cripple his presidency. And she may well succeed.

Pelosi’s strategy resembles the one she employed to debilitate another Republican president: George W. Bush. Bush returned to Washington after his 2004 reelection victory determined to partially privatize Social Security. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” he told the press, “and I intend to spend it.” Bush’s plan contained two main elements. The first was convincing the public that there was a crisis. Social Security, he declared in his 2005 State of the Union address, “is headed toward bankruptcy.” The second was persuading Democrats to offer their own proposals for changing it.

[Please see Updates at the end of this post.] I don’t know who the young man in the MAGA hat in this photo is. And I don’t care to know.

His name, which the internet will inevitably turn up, really doesn’t matter. It matters to his parents, of course—and to his teachers. I hope they will be reflective, and I know they should be ashamed: of this smirking young man and the scores of other (nearly all white) students from a Catholic school in Kentucky. Today, on the National Mall in Washington, they apparently mocked, harassed, and menaced a Native American man who had fought for the United States in Vietnam and who today represented both the U.S. and his Omaha nation with poise, courage, and dignity.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post, Liberation magazine, The New Leader, and The Christian Century. The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue.

America’s largest internet store is so big, and so bewildering, that buyers often have no idea what they’re going to get.

Updated at 5:28 p.m. ET on January 17, 2019.

There’s a Gatorade button attached to my basement fridge. If I push it, two days later a crate of the sports drink shows up at my door, thanks to Amazon. When these “Dash buttons” were first rumored in 2015, they seemed like a joke. Press a button to one-click detergent or energy bars? What even?, my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reasonably inquired.

They weren’t a joke. Soon enough, Amazon was selling the buttons for a modest fee, the value of which would be applied to your first purchase. There were Dash buttons for Tide and Gatorade, Fiji Water and Lärabars, Trojan condoms and Kraft Mac & Cheese.

The whole affair always felt unsettling. When the buttons launched, I called the Dash experience Lovecraftian, the invisible miasma of commerce slipping its vapor all around your home. But last week, a German court went further, ruling the buttons illegal because they fail to give consumers sufficient information about the products they order when pressing them, or the price they will pay after having done so. (You set up a Dash button on Amazon’s app, selecting a product from a list; like other goods on the e-commerce giant’s website, the price can change over time.) Amazon, which is also under general antitrust investigation in Germany, disputes the ruling.